The human remains at Windover were not all that the peat preserved.

The matrix surrounding the burials was an ecological archive — a record of the environment that the Windover community inhabited, preserved in the same waterlogged conditions that maintained the skeletal remains and the organic artifacts.

Pollen analysis from the Windover peat can potentially reconstruct the vegetation communities surrounding the pond at the time of the burials — the forest and scrub and wetland species that defined the landscape of the Early Archaic Florida interior.

The pollen record from ancient peat deposits is a standard tool of paleoecology, and the Windover peat offered a rare opportunity to pair paleoecological reconstruction with the archaeological evidence from the people who actually lived in that environment.